Behold Google Talk! A Mini-Review

Google Talk sees the light of day, and I buckle down and give you a mini- …

Google Talk has launched, and I'll give you my mini-review right now. Welcome to the Stone Age of instant messaging!

Google Talk is clean and easy to use. It's also absent almost every feature found in other IM clients. Want to send a file? Pshaw! Want to have a group chat? You're too social! Want to view your previous chat sessions easily? Get outta here! Want little emoticons? Skins? Go bug somebody else! Google Talk is Spartan in the way that the Lacedemonians were Spartan: it seems ancient!

Google Talk does, in fact, use Jabber, and we're having success here in the Labs getting on to GT with GAIM, Trillian, iChat, and even Adium. Indeed, curiously, some of us up in the Orbiting HQ can connect to the GT network using GAIM, but not Google's own client. To make matters worse, Google only provides a Windows client, but as you can see there are other options for the moment. Mac OS X and Linux support are planned for the future. In the meantime, any client with XMPP specs should be golden.

If whiz-bang is what you're looking for, don't look at Google Talk. Underwhelming is the word of the day, and this client has a long way to go if it's going to impress those of us who live and die by instant messenger (e.g., me). It does leverage the Gmail userbase for account access, so if you have a Gmail account, all you need is to download the client. However, that's just about where the integration ends. Sure, it shows you when you have new e-mail, and even lets you search your e-mail from within the client, but that's it. It doesn't save your chat history to the Gmail cluster, as I had hoped.

In fact, the logs generated by the client are difficult to visually parse because they are URL encoded. Here's a bit of conversation between Clint and myself, as represented in the log file (breaks inserted for formatting purposes):

As you can see, that's a format appropriate for a URL, which leads us to believe that the log files may eventually be sent to Gmail for storage. In the meantime, however, this is all you get, because the client does not provide a built-in way to see your chat history. (Rather than strain your eyes, I'll decode the above for you: it says that Clint sent me a message, first "same" and then "I was using Adium at home.")

On the plus side, the VoIP integration is good. Of course, if you've been using other IM clients, you've had that capability already, and Google Talk isn't particularly revolutionary in that regard.

The one shining light I see with Google Talk is the plans for federation of the service. Put simply, Google is planning to push interoperability by obtaining agreements with other IM and VoIP partners that would allow inter-service communications. The company believes that "service choice" should not affect who you can communicate with, much in the way that your choice of phone service providers doesn't limit who you can call.

We look forward to federating with any service provider who shares our belief in enabling user choice and open communications. We do believe, however, that it is important to balance openness with ensuring that we maintain a safe and reliable service that protects user privacy and blocks spam and other abuses. We are using the federation opportunity with EarthLink and Sipphone to develop a set of guidelines by which all members of the federated network can work together to ensure that we protect our users while maximizing the reach of the network. We are also eager to hear from other people in the industry about how best to build a federation model that is open, scalable, and ensures best-in-class user experiences.

A noble cause indeed.

Well, there you have it: my first impressions of Google Talk. If one thing is clear, Google has quite a bit of work to do. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll pack my bags and head for the border, because surely I've broken some law by not fawning over the service.

Ken Fisher / Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation.